What you need to know about business intelligence

Every company wants to be successful. That success always comes from growth. With most companies, growth comes from customer retention and new customer acquisition. "Business intelligence" can help a company win new customers and retain old ones. Business intelligence can be abbreviated BI. A formal definition of business intelligence is that it is a process of gathering information in the business area. In BI, the collected data is improved in information and then in knowledge. Business Intelligence can give any company a precise idea of ​​the needs of its clients. Businesses that have large amounts of information about their customers can act on that information. Businesses using BI gain insight and understanding of customer needs, customer decision-making, and economic, cultural, and technological trends. By using Business Intelligence, companies select short or long-term goals. BI helps a company achieve those goals.

Business intelligence history

The idea of ​​business intelligence dates back to Sun Tzu's "Art of War". Tzu believed that to win a war, you must have a complete knowledge of your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as your enemy's strengths and weaknesses. This is the central idea of ​​business intelligence today. Companies must know themselves better than their competitors, and they must know their competitors better. War and business are very similar considering that with BI, you have to filter a lot of data (both external and internal) for management to come up with strategies on where to run business and marketing. War also involves strategic plans. BI is the process of obtaining information about each element of your market. Simply understanding the client is not enough; A company must understand its competitors and itself.

KPI, key performance indicators

The current state of business is determined by the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in business intelligence. As more companies implement KPIs, data is available to companies more quickly and efficiently. The data used to be available to businesses only after a month or two. This premature availability did not help companies adjust their strategies. More recently, banks have tried to make data available earlier and at shorter intervals. Banks do this especially for companies that have a higher credit / operational risk burden. This allows many companies to obtain new data weekly and adjust their strategies faster than ever, leading to greater customer satisfaction and retention.

BI tools

When using business intelligence, a company has to collect a large amount of information. BI tools can help companies store, organize, and even collect business data. Some data tools are data warehouses, data modeling, and data mining. Using data tools helps improve the efficiency of business intelligence. While data tools are used for organization, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is used in the analysis process. OLAP is commonly known as Simple Analytics, which is based on dimensional analysis of hypercubes or "cubes".

There are also providers that help companies with business intelligence. A vendor provides a company with the business intelligence tools and support necessary for the successful implementation of a business process. Siebel Systems, Microsoft, Altius Consulting, Business-Soft and SAS Institute are just some of the companies that offer business intelligence tools and support.